Studyon Water-saving Effect Ofwater ResourceTax

Water resource is the basic material materials that restrict social and economic development.China's total water resource is rich but fresh water resource is scarce,the rate of water utilization is low and pollution problems are serious.For a long time,the government has guided water users to improve the utilization rate through collecting water resource fee.However,due to the confusion of collecting fee and weak enforcement,the protection of water resource has been minimal.As the extension and development of water resource fee,the pilot of water resource tax constitutes an important part of the Green Tax System.Since Hebei Province carries out the "fee-to-tax" pilot in 2016,the effects and problems of the reform have co-existed.The water resource tax adjusts water demand through tax leverage,which forces users to save water.At the same time,the difference in tax rates between surface water and groundwater is used to restrain overexploitation of groundwater,and to further optimize the water supply structure and promote sustainable use of water resource.On the other hand,at present,China's water resource tax levy standard is low,and the preferential treatment of water is relatively large especially in the agricultural sector and domestic water,which weakens the regulation of water resource in the tax system rules.Therefore,it is practically significant to explore the water-saving effect of water resource tax for futher improving the water resource tax system and strengthening the management and plan of water resource in China.This article focuses on empirical analysis,and adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis to study whether the water resource tax has water-saving effect on water resource.The first part introduces the study background and methods,sort out study content and structure,and introduce innovations and deficiencies.The second part analyzes the domestic and foreign literature from the theoretical basis,the green effect of(water)resource tax,the international experience and factors affecting water consumption,which lays the foundation for subsequent study.The third part combs the development process,current situation and comparison of fee and tax.The fourth part explains the influence mechanism of water resource tax on water consumption and water supply structure.The fifth and sixth part are the empirical study on the impact of water resource tax.The fifth part firstly tests the conditions under which the Difference-in-Difference(DID)model is applied to valid samples.In the sixth part,the article uses the DID model to empirical analyze the water-saving effect of water resource tax and the effect to water supply structure optimization,and test the robustness through the regression of some samples.The seventh part is the conclusion and policy recommendations of the article.Based on the analysis of the results of empirical research,combined with China's water situation and international experience,it puts forward policy recommendations to further perfect the water resource tax system.The conclusions of this paper are as follows:China's current water resource tax policy has a significant inhibitory effect on industrial water consumption,and the groundwater supply is significantly reduced,basically reaching the policy intention of saving water and optimizing the water supply structure.However,the water-saving effect of water resource tax in the field of agriculture water and domestic water is not obvious,which is related to the government's policy preference for agriculture and residents' life,the difficulty of agricultural water resource tax collection and the lack of elasticity of domestic water demand.There are two innovations in this paper.Firstly,the impact of water resource tax on water consumption is quantitatively analyzed by DID model,and the impact of water resource tax on water supply structure is quantitatively analyzed by comparative and empirical methods,and yet the previous studies mainly focused on the qualitative analysis and elaboration of water resource tax.Secondly,this paper chooses the municipal data of 152 cities in 16 provinces as the research object,while very few quantitative studies of existing literatures on water resource tax generally mainly select provincial data,and make brief analyses by mainly selecting the provincial water consumption data of Hebei Province.